


A Study in Spirals

by Just_A_Simple_Writer



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Because Michael, Except Michael, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Other, Porn With Plot, The Spiral, brief angst, canon-typical weirdness, dont ask me why she just is, gerry isn't really involved with the entities, i dont know what the timeline is and at this point im too afraid to ask, it/its pronouns for michael, lots of spirals, mary keay is the archivist, weird porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:29:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25628257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Just_A_Simple_Writer/pseuds/Just_A_Simple_Writer
Summary: Gerry was standing in front of a door.It was totally unremarkable, just an ordinary front door, save for being a pale yellow, but some people liked pale yellow front doors. That, in itself, was nothing strange.However.He was also standing in his lounge, and he was absolutely certain that there had not been a pale yellow front door here five minutes ago.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael Shelley
Comments: 9
Kudos: 90





	A Study in Spirals

**Author's Note:**

> apparently there's this whole thing with the timeline meaning that there's a huge age gap? well i have never paid attention to a date in my life so here's a timeline for this fic i have no idea if its even in the slightest canon compliant those are just the dates i pulled out of my ass
> 
> 1990-gerry is born  
> 1995-eric delano leaves the institute  
> 1997-eric delano dies  
> 2005-gertrude robinson dies  
> -mary keay replaces gertrude robinson as the archivist  
> -mary inherits emma harvey and fiona law as assistants  
> 2008-fiona law dies  
> -michael replaces her  
> 2010-michael becomes the spiral  
> -sasha james replaces him  
> 2015-this fic happens

Gerry was standing in front of a door.

It was totally unremarkable, just an ordinary front door, save for being a pale yellow, but some people liked pale yellow front doors. That, in itself, was nothing strange.

However.

He was also standing in his lounge, and he was _absolutely certain_ that there had not been a pale yellow front door here five minutes ago.

The door wasn’t _doing_ anything. Of course it wasn’t, it was a door, but doors didn’t often appear without warning on walls which had never had a door before.

He opened the door, and the door closed behind him, leaving him in a long corridor which was _definitely_ not in his lounge, or anywhere in his house.

When he turned around to close it again, and perhaps to figure out how he had ended up here without ever taking a step, he found that there _was_ no pale yellow front door. Just another long corridor stretching away ahead of him.

It seemed the door had … eaten him.

He started walking, since that was really the only option left to him. It seemed logical, and this place was so _il_ logical that if he didn’t do the logical thing he might go insane within minutes of being here.

Or maybe he was already insane. Sane people didn’t often have pale yellow doors appear in their lounge, and sane people certainly didn’t walk through them and get trapped in endless twisting passages.

He took a right, not knowing why, or indeed when the option of turning right had appeared. The carpet changed to a garish green, purple patterns wriggling and shifting across it.

Gerry noticed that he was awfully calm. That was probably another sign of madness, because he should be panicking right now. He didn’t panic easily, but this was _not_ a normal situation. At the very least his brain should be working overtime trying to figure out what was going on.

Instead he just kept walking.

He watched the carpet wriggling endlessly for a while, until it made him dizzy, and then he took another right, ignoring the carpet (red, with endless orange spirals), looking at the mirrors instead.

They weren’t reflecting him, just something him-adjacent, like funhouse mirrors at the carnival, except not like that at all. They twisted the eye tattoos on his hands into spirals.

His mother probably wouldn’t even miss him, he thought, looking at a mirror which made his reflection look wrong in so many ways that no mirror could, and found something standing behind him.

He spun, feeling flickers of fear for the first time.

There was nothing there, of course. Just another mirror which showed the same something behind him, further off down a corridor that wasn’t actually there.

He turned again and found that the corridor that wasn’t there was the only way left to go, so he started down it.

He was more cautious now. He didn’t like the thought that he might not be alone in here.

It might just be someone else who got eaten, of course, their body twisted into unrecognizable shapes by the mirrors.

That was logical though, and there for completely impossible in this illogical place.

Anyway, the thought scared him. It was an odd fear, though. Very impersonal.

He didn’t cry, or anything like that. Just kept walking. Sometimes he watched the carpet (yellow, then pink, then a colour his brain wouldn’t process, then green), or the mirrors. Sometimes they showed whatever it was that wasn’t there, sometimes it was just his twisted reflection, sometimes it was another passage which he stepped into and kept going.

And then it was nothing at all, and he stepped through it and found himself in a road two streets away from his own house.

He had been gone for a week.

No one believed him when he told them where he’d been, of course. Not even his mother, who he was _sure_ worked in the area of things like that, although she did give Gerry a long, thoughtful look before she dismissed the story out of hand and accused him of running away.

He was sent to hospital in the end, had endless doctors poke him and prod him and ask him questions about where he’d been and what he’d seen.

And all through it he kept catching glimpses of the thing that wasn’t there, the twisted, distorted figure, always a reflection.

He didn’t tell the doctors about that.

Now he was seeing it more, now he wasn’t trapped in whatever twisting corridors it lived in, he could almost make out the suggestion of features. He was sure it was blond, with hair that spiked and twisted and moved even when the figure was still.

It was the _hands_ that got him, though. They were always far too … wrong. Very wrong, though he never got a good enough look to realise in what way exactly they were wrong.

He tried not to look, he really did, but he was _curious_.

Maybe he should tell the doctors. Maybe he _was_ mad.

He didn’t _feel_ mad. Was ‘mad’ something you could feel? He didn’t know.

It was pointless to think about, but he couldn’t help it, and when he finally got sent home he couldn’t help but stare at the patch of wall on which the door had appeared.

He took his medicine, did everything the doctors had told him, but he just … couldn’t stop thinking about it.

And one day he couldn’t take it anymore. His mother was at work, and he was alone in the house.

He went over to the wall, just staring at it for a moment. It was still a wall, no sign of any pale yellow front door. Just the same as he remembered.

He raised a hand, hesitated for a moment, and then knocked on it.

Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened, why would it? It was just a wall, and magic doors didn’t just … appear in people’s lounges.

He turned and walked into the kitchen, a little annoyed with himself. It had been a stupid idea in the first place.

There was the unmistakable sound of a door opening.

He froze, standing in the entrance to the kitchen. The sound hadn’t come from him, it had come from the lounge, from the wall he had knocked on.

He knew immediately that he had made a mistake. Whatever it was he’d been seeing had just been watching him, and now he’d invited it into his _house._

The first thought that came to mind was that his mother was going to _kill_ him.

Assuming whatever he had just invited in didn’t kill him first.

The voice which came from the lounge was unlike anything he had heard before, almost like the audible version of hitting your funny bone. Like a human voice that had been … stretched, distorted. Like … he didn’t even know.

“You knocked,” it said.

It wasn’t a question, exactly, but nor was it quite a statement of fact. If he had to guess he would say it was … curious, maybe a little amused.

He didn’t want to see the thing in his lounge, but he didn’t want it to kill him without him ever seeing it, and he was still so _curious._

So he looked.

To his credit, he managed not to scream.

The … _thing,_ the _not really there_ was solid enough standing in his lounge, although its form … shifted and changed, one bit solidifying while another collapsed into spirals which hurt his eyes. It _was_ blond though, hair shifting and curling around where he guessed its face was, though any features it might have had were shifting and forming and collapsing into spirals even faster than the rest of it, and trying to focus on any one thing gave Gerry a headache. It was like … a glitch in reality.

Except it wasn’t, it was real, and he had _invited_ it _into his lounge._

He stared at its hands. They were too big, far too big, and its fingertips rested on the carpet. They looked very sharp, and he counted at least six knuckles, and bones in places bones shouldn’t be.

The hands seemed more stable than the rest of it, until he really tried to look at them, and then they bent and warped in ways that … just weren’t possible.

Maybe he hadn’t taken his medicine this morning.

“You knocked,” it said, again, and its voice grated on Gerry’s ears.

He could only nod, his throat dry.

It shifted, and he wondered in the back of his mind if it was uncomfortable. It didn’t seem to quite fit in the room, head twisted at a funny angle and shoulder against the ceiling, but it was so hard to look at.

“Do I scare you?” it asked, a moment later. Gerry was still trying to remember how to make words, to even collect his thoughts into something resembling coherence. He wasn’t sure if he was just terrified or if the … monster was having an actual effect on him.

It tilted its head more, until it was looking at him almost upside down, its neck, or what passed for one, twisted at an angle that was totally unnatural. “You don’t talk much.”

Gerry just stared at it for a moment, wondering what he was supposed to say to that. “Sorry?”

The monster (because he had decided that was what it was) laughed, like ceramic grating across itself, and Gerry cringed a bit. He thought it might have a mouth, but it seemed too big for its face.

“Who are you?” he asked, finally.

The monster laughed again, fragmenting and shifting, and Gerry realised it was sitting on the couch. Had it always been sitting there?

“I’m not a who,” it said, almost thoughtfully. “I’m a what.”

Gerry nearly rolled his eyes, before he remembered that he was talking to a monster standing in his lounge, and that perhaps patronising it was a bad idea.

“What are you, then?” he tried, not sure if the monster would answer. He just wanted to know what it was doing here, and to get it out before his mother got home.

“That is a question,” it said, its voice … almost soft, under the grating static of it.

Gerry blinked at it, wishing it wouldn’t talk in riddles. He was on edge as it was, and the nonsense it was talking wasn’t helping.

That was probably the point.

“Do you have a name?” he asked finally, and winced as the monster and the sofa it was sitting on burst into suggestions of colours and shapes before solidifying as a sofa with a monster sitting on it again.

“Yes,” it said, finally. “There is a name that was me and is now me.”

“What is it?” Gerry asked, hoping to get a straight answer for once.

“Michael,” it told him. Its voice was definitely soft, almost … confused. It still grated on him though, and he was really hoping his sofa would go back to normal once it left, because right now it still had the suggestions of shapes and colours that were both there and not drifting across it.

“Why are you here?” he said, and realised that he had pushed it too far when the monster burst into another mass of shifting shapes and colours, taking half the room with it and giving Gerry a headache.

“Stop asking,” it hissed. “Knowledge is not in my nature.”

Gerry almost asked what its nature was, but he didn’t want to make the mess of the room any worse by annoying it, and he felt sick from all the colours against his eyelids.

He closed his eyes, hoping to block it out, and heard the buzz of static increasing until it was almost unbearable.

And then there was the click of a door and it was gone. The room was back to normal, except…

The wallpaper had changed. It had been patterned with white flowers before on a cream background, and the colours were still the same, but the flowers had turned to tiny spirals, all over the walls.

He was still staring at them when his mother came home.

He knew his mother had seen them. She stopped when she walked into the lounge, following Gerry’s line of sight to the wall, and there was silence for a moment.

Then she just walked further into the room and asked if anything odd had happened today, and Gerry had lied. Neither of them mentioned the spirals on the walls.

He thought about the monster a lot. Michael. It didn’t seem to _fit_ , such a human name for something so … inhuman. He had _known_ a Michael, although he couldn’t remember where from.

Why did it even _have_ a name at all? Did it need one?

He had so many questions, but he doubted that it would want to answer them.

Where had it _come_ from? Why was it following him?

His mother must know _something_. She’d acted so strange about the spirals on the walls. But Gerry knew she wouldn’t tell him anything if he asked, so he would have to find a different way.

That way ended up being breaking into his mother’s place of work. The Magnus Institute.

It was surprisingly easy. He just said that he was there to see his mother and they let him walk right in and down to where they kept the statements.

Actually finding what he was looking for down there proved a lot harder. There didn’t seem to be any sort of system at all, and he didn’t even really know what he was looking for. Things about … spirals? Weird monsters? Doors?

None of those things seemed to be a category. There didn’t seem to be any sort of category at all, apart from a single sign that said ‘discredited’ in big, white letters, and a few labels on the boxes themselves.

“What are you looking for?” someone asked, and Gerry jumped, spinning around.

It wasn’t his mother, which was a relief. Just a girl with long brown hair tied into intricate braids.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“I’m helping my mother with something,” he told her, leaning back against the shelves. “She’s the archivist here?”

The girl rolled her eyes, apparently unimpressed. “Oh, you’re Gerry. Sasha.”

She stuck a hand out, and he shook it cautiously. She didn’t do anything horrible to him, which was nice.

“What are you looking for?”

Gerry thought about that for a moment. “Things about … doors,” he said, finally. “And spirals.”

The girl, Sasha, grinned. “I know where to find that.”

She started walking further into the shelves and Gerry followed her. She talked a lot, asking him question about what he was researching, why his mother had asked for help with it, and Gerry answered as best he could without revealing the truth.

“So,” she said, stopping by a shelf, “you ran into the Distortion and you don’t want your mum to know, so you’re trying to figure out what it is by yourself?”

Gerry stared at her. “No.”

“You’d be fine if I told your mum you’d been here, then?”

“…no.”

Sasha grinned. “I thought not. The files you want will be on this shelf.” She patted the metal. “Good luck.”

Gerry watched her turn and walk out of the archive, whistling. She was _weird_ , but in an oddly comforting way.

He opened the boxes and started going through the files she had pointed him to.

There were a _lot_ of them, and the vast majority seemed to be nonsense, but eventually he managed to pull together a vague profile of what Sasha had called the Distortion, and what had called itself Michael.

The hands and the hair seemed to be pretty consistent, as did the maniacal laughter and the non-answers and chaos, but he found a few statements which described it looking … human until viewed in a reflection.

He payed most attention to those ones, wanting to be able to identify it if he saw it. He got the impression it wasn’t likely to leave him alone.

They described a boy who seemed almost Gerry’s age, with long, curly blond hair and pale blue eyes. Apparently it most often looked sad, though it still spoke in nonsense sentences and laughed at everything.

Reading the statements put Gerry rather on edge, and he couldn’t help keeping an ear out for the creak of a door.

There was nothing, though. Just the silence of the archives.

He made sure to put all the files back when he left, though his mother’s archive was so unorganised that it barely seem to matter, and as he was sliding one of the boxes off a top shelf a sheet of paper that was unsecured fell off, drifting to the ground.

He bent down to pick it up, expecting it to be a statement, and found that it was a drawing of a boy with a sad, faraway look in his eyes, and Gerry realised with a jolt that _that_ must be the distortion. He- _it_ \- looked so … normal. Nothing like the shifting mass of shapes and colours that Gerry had spoken to in his lounge.

He pocketed the drawing.

It was weeks before he encountered it again, and he wouldn’t have recognised it if he hadn’t spent hours staring at the drawing. It was just sitting in a coffee shop, a cup in its hands, and watching one of the baristas walking around the shop. Gerry was into the shop and halfway across it by the time he really how crazy what he was doing was, and he’d already sat down in front of it by the time his mind caught up and tried to stop him.

It slowly turned to look at him, and he almost got up and left right away. It did look like the drawing, though there was something else in its eyes apart from that sad, faraway look. Terror, maybe.

“Hello,” it said, and Gerry winces. Its voice was still the same, that horrible, jarring sound.

No one else seemed to have noticed.

Gerry swallowed, closing his eyes for a second to try and stop his head spinning. “You haven’t been following me.”

“You haven’t knocked again.”

He glanced at its cup and found that it was still full of a black liquid, probably coffee. He could see its twisted reflection in the stuff.

“Do people have to knock?” That was a question, but it didn’t seem to annoy the Distortion. Calling it that felt so much more natural than _Michael._

“No. You did, though.”

Gerry didn’t really know what that meant, and he was feeling very uncomfortable. His head was fuzzy.

“Who are you?” he blurted out, knowing he’d asked already.

The Distortion shifted, reality warping for a moment, and then it was sitting next to Gerry, both of them facing the same way. The cup was still in its hands.

“You want me to describe myself?” it said, upending the cup. The coffee didn’t move, the cup spilling over its hands and onto the table. Gerry just stared.

A waitress came over to ask if Gerry wanted a drink, and the Distortion told her he would have water.

She brought him tea, and he thanked her.

The Distortion took a sip of its coffee.

“I don’t like coffee,” it said, finally.

Gerry didn’t ask again. Just drank what wasn’t tea and ignored the spirals shimmering in the liquid.

No one else in the shop even looked over at them. He wasn’t even sure there _was_ anyone else in the shop.

He was starting to think that the feeling of going mad was just a side effect of spending too much time with the Distortion.

It looked unsettlingly human. He almost preferred the weirdness, because he couldn’t help but admit that the thing-that-looked-like-a-boy sitting in front of him was _pretty_ , in a slightly odd sort of way. Soft golden waves of hair and big blue eyes.

He tried not to think about that.

“I should go,” he said, when he’d finished his tea.

“Perhaps,” the Distortion told him, and grinned, its smile stretching beyond the limits of its face and still not meeting its eyes.

He fled, pausing only to ensure the door he walked through really was the door of the café.

It started appearing in his peripheral again after that. And then in his lounge. And his bedroom.

It didn’t talk much, and after the first few times Gerry mostly ignored it.

The form it kept to was mostly human, only too thin, and its hands were far too big and sharp. Its hair moved around, too.

Gerry just got used to tuning it out.

He researched it more, though, going back to the archives over and over again to read through the statements and to talk to the assistants. (Sasha, usually, but sometimes the older woman who Sasha said was called Emma.)

The Distortion, he found, was attached to something called the spiral, although he couldn’t quite figure out if they were different names for the same thing, or if the Distortion lived inside the spiral. It was hard to differentiate.

Sasha was surprisingly helpful. She knew a lot, and was very perceptive. She didn’t even bat an eye when Gerry told her that the Distortion sat in his room occasionally, although she did seem to think it was only a matter of time before he disappeared.

“Is that about me?” the Distortion asked one evening, plucking a sheet of paper from Gerry’s hands.

It was.

“No,” Gerry told him, grabbing it back. The words had rearranged themselves into endless spirals, and it was unreadable. “Was that necessary?”

“Nothing is,” it told him, smile stretching too far.

The words went back to normal when it left.

It was a few weeks after that that he found a photo of it in his mother’s desk at home. He hadn’t even been thinking about it, just looking for some staples, but there it was. It looked as though it had been torn from some larger photo, one edge ragged.

He took it back to his room to look at it.

It didn’t look quite like the Distortion. It was smiling, but the smile was _normal_ , not stretched off its face, and there was no sign of that resigned terror which was a staple of the Distortion’s most human form.

This, more than anything Gerry had seen, might be someone called Michael.

“Hello.”

Speak of the devil. He hadn’t even heard a door open.

He looked up and found the Distortion poking through his bookcase.

“Don’t touch those,” he said, rolling his eyes and sitting up. “Is this you?”

He held out the photo, and the Distortion came over, plucking it out of his hand with two sharp fingers.

There was a long silence, and then the Distortion began flickering in the way that meant it was distressed, the walls of the room wavering and shifting, spirals appearing in the wallpaper.

“No,” the Distortion said finally. “Yes. Someone else who was me who is me who is not.”

The room was twisting now, reality bending out of shape and spiralling, and Gerry was caught in the middle of it, wishing he hadn’t said anything. He was scared, though he didn’t think the Distortion (Michael?) would really hurt him. Not on purpose, at least, but he had upset it.

He closed his eyes to try and block out the mess of sound and colour and twisting, hoping that it would end soon, but he could still feel it to his bones, like hitting his funny bone but all over his body, making him shake and his skin crawl.

And then it was over, and he risked opening his eyes. His room was back to normal, though the walls were covered in spirals and there were deep tears in his carpet, the marks of bony fingers. The photo had been left on the ground, but it was distorted beyond recognition.

He put it in his desk anyway.

He needed to know who that boy had been. How he had become … _that_.

And he couldn’t help but think of the Distortion as Michael, now. It was more human than it pretended to be, even with all of its non-answers and strangeness. It could still _feel_.

Sasha, as it turned out, provided the most help. There had been a Michael who worked at the institute, before she had, but she still remembered his name. Another of Gerry’s mother’s assistants. They had gone on a trip, and Michael hadn’t made it back.

Gerry remembered that trip. His mother hadn’t told him where they were going, but she hadn’t seemed excited about it.

Michael had died there, Sasha said.

But maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d just … changed.

He didn’t think whatever it was now would appreciate the questions, but he had to know.

It was a long time before Michael returned, and Gerry didn’t try to call it. He wasn’t sure if it would even come, and he didn’t want to anger it.

But finally he heard the tell-tale creak of a pale yellow front door opening, and he looked up from his desk to see Michael standing in his room, looking far more like a mess of shapes and colours than it usually did, but it was there, and Gerry found he was relieved.

“Hey,” he said, and watched it smile. “It’s been a while.”

“Time is a lie,” it told him seriously, and sat on his bed. “Space is also a lie.”  
“Are you a lie?” Gerry asked, more curious as to what it would say than the true answer.

“I am the very meaning of deception,” it told him, tilting its head upside-down.

Gerry turned his chair around so he was facing it, watching the colours shift in what passed for its skin.

It was odd, the shifting shapes and colours were less prone to giving him headaches. They were almost mesmerising. Beautiful.

He had stopped being afraid, somewhere along the line.

“You were Michael,” he said, cautiously. He didn’t want it to leave. “You worked for my mother.”

Its form began to shift and change, the spirals in the walls beginning to spin.

“He was me,” it said, nothing in its voice recognisable. “I was him. He unbecame and became me.”

Gerry didn’t really know what that meant, but he cautiously walked over to sit on the bed beside it, very wary of how sharp its hands were, and put a hand on where he guessed its wrist to be, watching the tattoos on his joints twist into spirals again.

It stilled, its arm solidifying into something that was at least visible, if not human-looking.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tracing a hand down its wrist and into the centre of its palm, feeling bones in all the wrong places under the skin.

Touching it felt … weird, almost like touching electricity. It sent a faint hum through his body.

But despite that it was … nice, and there was a slight thrill from being able to calm it down. He had done that, who had only ever seemed to make arguments worse.

“Your mother,” it rumbled a moment later, and he could _feel_ its emotions, the turmoil in its chest, flowing through where his hand was resting on its. “She is … lies.”

“You knew her.”

“ _Trusted_ her.”

Gerry hesitated, not sure he wanted to ask what happened. But he couldn’t _not_. He had to know.

“What did she do to you?”

Michael was silent for a moment, the spirals on the walls beginning to spin again and the reality around them distorting into odd shapes, twisting into an endless spiral with them at the centre.

It didn’t answer in words, the room twisting into pictures instead, into doors and pictures and ideas.

They were disjointed and messy, but Gerry watched regardless, doors and spirals and his _mother_ telling Michael to go through the door, telling him it would be safe, and _lying_.

After that it collapsed into corridors and spirals and Gerry couldn’t make sense of anything apart from the overwhelming terror that covered everything, and he honestly couldn’t tell where it had come from.

“Did it hurt?” he asked softly, and Michael (the real Michael, as much as it _was_ real) turned its spiralling eyes on him.

He hadn’t really looked at its eyes before, past noticing that it had a wall eye, one blue and one yellow, but he hadn’t _looked._ They spun in endless circles, and Gerry thought they were oddly beautiful.

And then Michael leaned forward and kissed him.

The first thing Gerry noticed was that its mouth seemed oddly human.

The second thing he noticed was how much it _hurt_.

It wasn’t any traditional pain, but it felt like every part of his body was shifting and moving, being rearranged and stretched and melted, and he realised, somewhere through the haze of it, that this was the answer to his question.

_Did it hurt?_

_Yes._

It felt like an age before Michael pulled away and the pain stopped suddenly, leaving him feeling strangely empty.

His room looked normal. _He_ looked almost normal, but for the fact his tattoos were spirals now, the eyes distorted beyond recognition. Michael looked … the same as it always did.

Michael didn’t say anything else, just stepped back, disappearing through a door. It closed behind it and was gone, leaving Gerry alone, and the tattoos never went back to normal.

His mother had done that. On purpose. Why?

And Michael had kissed him. He didn’t understand that either. Surely there were other ways it could have answered that question, even if it _had_ to have done … that.

Had it _wanted_ to?

Was this just another lie, another way to confuse him?

So many questions.

He needed to talk to his mother.

It didn’t go well, as predicted. His mother shouted at him, told him that he couldn’t possibly understand why she had done what she did.

Gerry didn’t tell her about Michael, didn’t tell him that they’d _talked,_ though he knew she’d noticed that the tattoos she’d made him get had changed. He couldn’t spend his whole life in fingerless gloves _._

He just listened to her yell and realised that hated her.

Had he always? Or was that something Michael had given him, pushing its thoughts and feelings into his head?

No, he had always hated her, at least a little. He’d just had to hide it, to push it down so far that even he hadn’t realised, because she was all the family he had, at least after his father had disappeared.

The knowledge that she had sent someone innocent, someone who had _trusted_ her to become … _that,_ only made it worse.

He didn’t speak to his mother much over the next few weeks, and he started looking for a job, a house. Somewhere else to go.

Michael didn’t reappear, and he found he missed it, a little. Its presence had become an almost comforting constant when he was working, even though it had a habit of ruining his books, or making them contain stories he was sure he had never read before. Once it had even changed an assignment so the words on every page were still readable, but arranged in spirals. He hadn’t even noticed until he’d submitted it.

It had never hurt him, though. He didn’t know if it even wanted to. Maybe it was just biding its time until it dragged him back into its hallways, but he didn’t think so.

And then one day he turned around and it was sitting on his bed, tracing spirals on his ceiling. He hadn’t even heard the door.

He didn’t ask where it had been, and it didn’t volunteer the information. Just kept coming back every few days when the house was empty and Gerry was alone. It always seemed to know when his mother was out.

He talked to it a bit. Told it about the job interviews, and the house search.

It seemed amused. Sometimes pressed its fingers to the screen and all the pictures turned to swirling colours.

He told it about the job he was most hopeful about, working full-time in a small, local coffee shop. It wasn’t too well paid, but it would be enough to live on, and he liked coffee.

And then he didn’t get it, and he told Michael about how disappointed he was. It just listened, as it always seemed to.

They called him back a week later to tell him they’d had a surprise opening and the job was his, if he wanted it. He was delighted, of course, but he couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to _create_ the opening. If someone had gone home late one night and not noticed that their front door had been replaced by a pale yellow one.

He didn’t ask. Just told Michael that he was happy.

The job was good, really good, if only because it meant he got his own money, and he found himself a place, moved in by himself.

It was _good_. So good.

Michael kept showing up, and it seemed delighted the first time it appeared after Gerry had decorated and found the walls covered in little spirals. Gerry had chosen that wallpaper almost unconsciously, and he was halfway through putting it up when he realised.

Michael poked at it with one weird hand and smiled all off its face, its laugh echoing through the tiny apartment.

They hadn’t talked about the kiss, though, and it hadn’t happened again. Gerry was beginning to think that Michael had only done it because it wanted to show him something.

He didn’t even know if he _wanted_ to talk about it. What would he say, anyway? _Remember when you kissed me because I’d accidently made you think about something horrible and you wanted to show me how it felt?_

So he didn’t ask. He didn’t bring it up or mention it, and neither did Michael. It just … kept showing up, doors appearing at random places in his apartment.

He marked out a space on the wall with tape, in the end, and told Michael that it had to put its door there, so he knew where it was. It laughed at that, but usually put the doors there, although it also took great pleasure in opening them in unexpected places and making Gerry jump.

He hadn’t touched it again, after that weird day in his bedroom, although sometimes he found his hands reaching out towards it, to touch its hair or its hands, but he never did.

And then his apartment was broken into.

It was his own fault, really. He had never changed the locks, although he’d known that the old one was _very_ old, and not very sturdy.

Either way, he was awake now, alone in his apartment, and he could hear someone walking around in it. More than one person.

He had thought the noise was Michael at first, but it would have come straight into his room, not to mention there was no sign of the static and slight feeling of vertigo that accompanied it.

He was sitting up in bed now, blankets pulled up to his chest, and listening for the noises. They went around his lounge and through his kitchen, and then made their way towards his room. He froze.

The handle turned slowly and he sprang to life, pulling open the drawer in his bedside table and fumbling for the knife that he was sure he’d left there, just in case. He was so used to the sound of a door creaking open, but this was different from when Michael walked into his room, and it was a horrible sound.

A flashlight came around the door and shone on his face, and he looked at the man who carried it. He couldn’t make out anything about him, other than the fact he was tall, and he carried a knife in his hand.

Gerry closed his hand around his own knife, but the man had moved faster than Gerry would have thought possible, slamming one hand over his mouth and using the other to twist his wrist, forcing him to drop the knife.

“Quiet,” he hissed, pressing his hand down. “Listen to me, and you might just survive.”

Gerry nodded, and didn’t try to scream when the man took his hand away.

He was dragged out of bed and into the lounge, where the other intruder was standing, the man’s knife pressed into his back.

His eyes kept drifting to the spot on the wall where he’d taped the crude shape of a door. If he could just get over there, maybe Michael would hear him knocking and come to help.

Or else he would get stabbed.

The men kept talking, discussing what to do about the house, about Gerry, and it was starting to sound like he would get stabbed either way. They didn’t like that he’d seen them, and they wanted him dead.

He made a break for the wall, in the end, hoping to be able to slam his fist against it before the men could catch him.

One of them lunged for him, grabbing his wrist and slamming him against the wall hard, pain exploding across his stomach. His vision twisted, and for a moment he thought it was Michael, but it was just pain, and when he pressed a hand to his stomach he could feel blood there.

He’d been stabbed, he realised, rather hysterically.

He was dragged away from the wall and another burst of pain exploded through him, but through it he was _sure_ he heard the sound of a door opening.

The man dropped him on the floor and he lay on the yellow carpet, hands pressed to his stomach and wondering if this was how he died.

Someone screamed, a long way off, and he stared at the carpet as the colour got brighter, little green spirals beginning to spin in it. The last thing he felt was being gently lifted off the ground in huge, sharp hands.

When he woke up he felt … fine. He was in bed, and there was a soft beeping from off to his right.

He was in hospital, he realised slowly, but he was alive. Alive and alright.

He sat up, propping himself up on the pillows behind him, and realised that he wasn’t _completely_ fine. It still hurt when he moved, but the pain wasn’t as bad as he remembered it being.

He looked around. The room was empty, and he was alone.

A nurse came in a while later and told him what had happened. Someone had heard a scream and called the police, who’d arrived to find Gerry unconscious on his sofa, bandaged but alone. There was no sign of either who’d stabbed him or who’d bandaged him up afterwards.

He knew what had happened, but he didn’t tell the nurse that. Just that his apartment had been broken into by two men with knives.

She patted his shoulder. “You have a visitor waiting. Should I send him in?”

Gerry nodded, wondering who it was and hoping it was Michael. He didn’t know if it would actually visit him, or if it would wait outside if it did, but he could hope.

She walked out of the door, closing it behind her.

When the door opened a moment later it was accompanied with a slight twist in reality, and Gerry looked up, delighted, to find Michael standing in the doorway, looking about as human as it ever did and with its hands buried deep in the pockets of its grey coat.

“Hi,” he said, smiling, and Michael looked up at him with its wide, terrified eyes, even as its mouth stretched into a smile that didn’t look right on its face.

He could see how hard it was trying to stay in a form that looked even remotely human, and he could just about see shapes flowing under its skin, but it was doing a good job.

It came over to his bed (or at least, it was by his bed a moment later. Whether it had actually moved was unclear) and looked him over, its eyes still spiralling. One of them was leaking yellow under the blue, and the effect was a little odd.

“Hi,” Gerry said again, reaching out without thinking to put his hand on Michael’s. The hand in question shattered into spirals as soon as Gerry touched it, but he left his own hand there, still able to feel it, in some odd way.

Michael just stared at their hands for a moment, like it didn’t even know why it was here.

“They’re gone,” it said, finally, its hand solidifying into something large and sharp. The rest of its body was slowly stretching out, like putty being pulled.

“Thank you,” Gerry said, thoughtfully running his fingers over what passed for skin on its hands. It was more like touching colours, but he liked it. “You saved my life.”

He didn’t ask if they were dead, or just aimlessly wandering the corridors. He wasn’t sure if he had a preference.

“I did,” Michael told him. Its face wasn’t really a face anymore, its eyes back to endless spirals of blue and yellow. Gerry wondered if it was upset, or just confused.

“Why?” he asked, looking up towards where he was sure its eyes were, until he started to feel dizzy.

“I think,” it said slowly, beginning to trace spirals into the back of Gerry’s hand with one long finger. The rest of its hand was still under his. “I claimed you.”

That wasn’t as scary a thought as it should’ve been, being claimed by a monster. He didn’t think it meant claimed in the same way as the others it drew into its corridors.

He thought that maybe he already knew. His whole body was covered in tattooed spirals, after all.

“Why?” he asked again.

“I wanted to,” it said, and the machine monitoring Gerry’s heartbeat began to beat a rhythm. “No. Michael wanted to. I wanted what I wanted what Michael wanted which is you.”

It was shifting around, moving from one side of Gerry’s bed to another, and the room was beginning to twist, the roof sagging like a tarpaulin full of water. Gerry linked his fingers through its and pulled it closer, until instead of standing it was sitting on Gerry’s bed, the mattress not bending an inch under the weight that wasn’t there.

And Gerry leaned up, pressing his lips to about where he thought its mouth was.

He may have missed, but regardless there were surprisingly human lips on his a moment later, and this time the only feeling was like a hum of warm electricity through his body as the rest of the room became more of a suggestion than anything else, like an unfinished sketch.

The rest of the room didn’t really seem to matter as he pulled Michael closer, tangling on of his hands in its endless curls, feeling them wriggle under his fingers. They felt more like feathers than hair, but he liked it anyway, and there were sharp fingers pulling him ever closer but being so careful not to hurt, not even tearing his clothes.

“That was nice,” Michael said, when Gerry finally pulled away, his head spinning pleasantly. Michael’s skin had turned into a shifting mass of reds and purples and pinks, and Gerry guessed that it was a suggestion of blushing.

It was … cute, actually.

“Yes,” he said, running a hand through his hair and finding that it, too, had turned into a mass of untameable curls. Probably not a great look.

The pulses on the heart-rate monitor had turned into stylised hearts.

And then there was the click of a door and Michael was gone, the rest of the room fading back to normal.

Gerry was worried that it would be weeks before he saw Michael again, but when he opened the door to leave the hospital a day later, having been discharged, he found himself wandering Michael’s corridors instead of the carpark.

He was worried, for a moment, that Michael had decided to kill him, or to drive him mad, or whatever it did with its victims, but another door opened in front of him almost immediately, and he found himself back in his apartment, Michael sitting on the couch.

“Hello,” he said, surprised, and Michael smiled at him all off its face. “Did you kidnap me?”

“I didn’t want to wait,” it said, screwing its face up into … something.

“I thought time was a lie,” Gerry teased gently, walking over to sit next to it on the couch. It flowed into his lap, and he played with its curls. It felt natural.

“A lie you live with, and so I must live with,” Michael told him, its spinning eyes gone. Gerry guessed it’d closed them.

“Did you miss me?” he asked gently, and a single yellow orb appeared about where its face was, spinning gently.

“No,” it said, in a way that suggested _yes_.

Gerry didn’t push the issue, just leaned down and kissed it.

That same warm electricity flowed through him, the room fading away until they were sitting on nothing in the middle of everything, and Michael pushed him back, the suggestion of a couch melting away and becoming the suggestion of a bed, and they kept kissing.

Gerry realised, a laugh bubbling up in his chest, that despite this, despite the fact that Michael was mostly a feeling, just shifting colours in Gerry’s vision and the sensation of a mouth on his and hands on his shoulders, it was still wearing a _coat_. Gerry could feel it, somehow.

He pushed at it, and then realised that it had buttons and started fumbling with them, the odd little spirals that looked almost like eyes, managing to get rid of two before it wasn’t there anymore, and Michael’s not-chest was bare. Gerry knew there wasn’t a shirt there, although he wasn’t sure how he knew. Maybe it was the pulsing red mass of spirals, just where Michael’s heart should be.

Gerry pressed his hand to it, felt it beat.

He could do this forever, just lie here kissing Michael, feeling it pressed to his chest, surrounding him.

Still, the electricity still flowing through his body was making him almost desperate for … something. Anything. More than this.

It didn’t help that Michael was pressed so tight against him, so he could feel every time it moved.

He realised that at least half of the want wasn’t coming from him, flowing out of Michael and into his body, and he pulled away just long enough to catch a breath and look Michael in the eyes, at least as much as he could.

They were in his bedroom, on his bed, and his duvet cover was covered in interlocking spirals. That didn’t really seem important right now.

“Michael,” he asked, breathless, watching the multiple layers of it shifting over and out of one another. “What do you want?”

“Want?” Michael asked, its eyes taking up most of its face. Gerry noticed with a start that some of the spirals in them had turned to hearts. “Wanting is not in my nature.”

That was a lie, Gerry could _feel_ how much of a lie it was.

“You do,” he said, touching Michael’s face, careful of its eyes. “Tell me.”

It twisted its head ninety degrees, though its eyes stayed in the same place, just watching him.

“I don’t,” it insisted, its smile stretching across its face and covering one of its eyes for a moment. A hand snaked under Gerry’s shirt and then the shirt was pushed off completely, somehow bypassing his arms and his head and disappearing into the blankets. “I would _like_ for you to feel good, though. If you’d be amenable to that.”

Gerry laughed. “Yes. Of course.”

Michael’s smile stretched further, and then the rest of Gerry’s clothes melted off him and disappeared, leaving him naked on the bed, Michael hovering over him. It was close enough to keep him warm, and he barely even reacted to the clothes being gone.

Michael was still half dressed, Gerry could tell the difference between the layers of swirls which _were_ Michael and the suggestion of clothes, but he didn’t protest, not with Michael’s hands wandering over his bare skin almost reverently, and then Michael’s mouth was on his again and the room faded out into colours and shapes, his brain unable to process what was really going on.

Everything after that was disjointed and felt … just _felt._

He felt Michael’s hands all over him, touching him in ways that no human could, and it was glorious. At some point there was something inside him (a finger? Multiple?), twisting and pushing and taking him apart, bit by bit.

He must have been making noise, but all he could hear was Michael’s laughter, ringing in his ears and throughout the not-apartment, shaking the foundations of it.

Gerry was shaking. There were so many lights and colours and the pressure of Michael’s skin against his was so perfect even as he knew it felt so wrong.

The fingers inside him felt wrong too, but he couldn’t care, not when they were making him feel so good, bones that shouldn’t be there pushing against everything that felt good and right and it was.

He was just.

Just...

_Good._

The room shattered, and Gerry shattered with it, feeling his bones melt and pull apart and it felt like … what had Michael called it? Unbecoming. It felt like that, the rearranging and pulling, only this was in all the right ways and it felt like being made and unmade by some sort of god.

Maybe Michael _was_ some sort of god. It certainly wasn’t _human_.

It didn’t stop, either. Even as the room slowly began to reform it didn’t let him go, breaking him and the room and everything else in new ways, over and over again, until Gerry really didn’t know what reality was anymore.

Maybe this was how it caught him, finally drove him mad.

It could’ve been days, for all Gerry knew, but it stopped eventually, wrapping him up in its arms and holding him against his chest, letting him come down from the high.

The room, when it finally settled back into reality, was mostly as he remembered it, apart from the duvet cover and the wallpaper. And the ceiling. Everything seemed to have been covered in spirals.

“Wow,” he said, when his tongue stopped twisting and he could speak again. “That was. Um.”

Michael’s laughter echoed in his ears for a moment, but it didn’t say anything.

“Do you want me to…” he trailed off, not sure how to ask if Michael had gotten off on it too. Could it?

“No,” Michael said firmly, before he could talk himself into a hole, and left it at that.

Gerry nodded, and dropped the subject, cuddling into Michael’s chest instead and letting it hold him.

It _hadn’t_ been days, only three hours since he had been discharged from the hospital. Gerry wandered around his apartment on wobbly legs, looking for a drink of water.

“I could have done that,” Michael said, watching Gerry pour the water into a glass.

“Didn’t want spirals in it,” Gerry told it, drinking the water slowly and smiling at Michael over the rim.

“There are spirals in your blood,” Michael said, grinning widely, and Gerry narrowed his eyes at it.

“Is that true?”

Michael wouldn’t elaborate, just reached into a cupboard and found itself a biscuit. It ate half, and then gave Gerry the other half, which was a cupcake. Gerry just ate it.

Michael just … didn’t really leave, after that. Its door became a permanent staple of Gerry’s lounge, and Michael was usually there when Gerry got home from work, sitting on his spiral-patterned couch. It hadn’t been spiral-patterned when Gerry had bought it, but neither had anything else in his apartment. Even the wallpaper had gained some spirals.

It was alright, though. Gerry liked his spirally apartment, and his spirally boyfriend, no matter how odd either of them were. Life was good, in a spirally sort of way.

**Author's Note:**

> this will also be posted on my [ tumblr](https://jaysworlds.tumblr.com/) :p
> 
> i live for kudos and comments etc etc you know the drill


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